Modern communication and collaboration systems provide a large variety of services. These services can range from multiple forms of messaging (voicemail, email, texting, and so forth) to real time collaborations such as voice and video conferencing. These services have been widely deployed. There is a broad acceptance that they have contributed greatly to the increase in economic productivity that has been witnessed in the last thirty years. However there is a perennial issue which affects these services. The physical infrastructure that has been required to implement them has made them uneconomical for small and very small installations. Such installations can be situated in small or home office businesses or branch offices of larger enterprises. These organizations can benefit from new communication and collaboration systems but are prevented by the cost, which may not be amortized effectively across the small number of user devices in such installations.
Manufacturers of such systems have tried to address this problem for many years. Nevertheless economic and technological reality typically requires that systems designed for these small and very small installations offer fewer and different types of services than those available for larger organizations.
One alternative is to locate expensive equipment, such as dedicated telecommunications servers, at a centralized location. Users can then rent the services provided at the centralized location. The rise of networking technologies, marked by the pervasive connectivity afforded by the internet, and the availability of high-speed interconnections (multi-megabit network connections are priced at the consumer level) has led to a model of centralized network-based or hosted services being offered to small organizations.
For example, Google and its competitors offer free or very modestly priced Internet-based office applications (word processing, scheduling, Email, instant messaging) to the public including the small and very small organizations under discussion. There is also much discussion of similarly based hosted web service applications in customer relationship management, and other services of interest to small and very small organizations.
However, many organizations find the prospect of basing their telecommunications systems on externally owned technologies unattractive. When relying on external service provides, the users must depend on the providers to maintain the quality and currency of these systems. Many organizations would rather control the technology that is essential to the way they do business, rather than rely on an outside party whose interests are not their own. Many organizations consider their communication and collaboration infrastructure to be one of strategic advantage. The ability to customize and upgrade their infrastructure as the opportunity arises can enable the organization to gain a competitive advantage.
Reference will now be made to the exemplary embodiments illustrated, and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended.